


kissed the darkness three times

by monopolizers



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - High School, F/F, Gender Non-Conforming Character, Internalized Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 05:27:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5193917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monopolizers/pseuds/monopolizers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somehow, though. In a car with Zayn, one of the most beautiful girls she’d ever seen, late at night like this, less than a breath’s distance between them, it felt very risky. She swallowed and looked the other way, out the window.</p>
            </blockquote>





	kissed the darkness three times

**Author's Note:**

> title from [Alex-Quan Pham's When I Spoke](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/250624).
> 
> in addition to the tags, characters discuss the everyday sexism they experience, as well as some implied Islamaphobia. if there's anything else you want to know, please drop me a comment and I will gladly help out!
> 
> originally posted [here](http://hotgaydumbledore.tumblr.com/post/129241439627/fic-prompt-ziam-listening-to-music-in-a-car).

“You good if I park here? By the school?” Zayn asked after a moment, twisting from the driver’s seat to look at Liam. Her eyes, dark and long lashed, were hidden in the shadow cast from the stern ridge of her brow bone, the eerie artificial light from the streetlamp illuminating only parts of her face.

“Yeah,” Liam said. She twisted her hands. She and Zayn had been talking more this year, it was true, but it had still been a surprise when Zayn had called her up a couple of hours ago.

“Hang out?” Liam had asked. She was sitting by her bedroom window. She stared outside at the big tree in her front yard, the one all the neighborhood kids liked to challenge each other to climb. No one was there now–it was night time–but the way the wind was blowing the branches around made it look like someone could be.

“Uh–” Zayn had said. Her voice sounded different over the phone. “I mean–yeah? Like, just–driving around–”

“Driving?” Liam had asked over her at the same time, and then said, “sorry, sorry–” even as Zayn was apologising.

“You know,” Zayn said. “Just hanging out. We can go get a kebab in town or something if you want. I can drive.”

“Yeah.” Liam wanted the solidity of an action, a plan. To drive around at night with Zayn and a nebulous idea of spending time together felt dangerous, excitingly forbidden. “Yeah!” she said, stronger this time. “That sounds good. Um–at ten? If that’s good?”

She could hear Zayn’s smile over the phone as she said, “that’s all right with me.” The rest of the night she’d waited with an increasing tension in her chest, a nervous twisting in her hands that spread all over until her mother made her chop vegetables to see her sit still for a second.

Now–after an awkward drive, after kebabs–they were sitting in Zayn’s car by Liam’s old elementary school. The kebabs were long gone, and now Liam had nothing to do with her hands. She twisted them in her lap again. Zayn wasn’t looking at her, staring out at the street instead, and Liam took the chance to really look her fill at the way the fluorescent orange light highlighted the curve of Zayn’s cheek, the delicate sweep of her eyelashes, the long ridge of her nose and the bow of her lips. Looking like this was dangerous. Even if it wasn’t anything Zayn didn’t know about her, it was dangerous. Liam was aware what people said about her and knew what was true–the short crop of her hair, the plaid she wore, the workmanlike jeans–all signs she didn’t refute or deny.

Somehow, though. In a car with one of the most beautiful girls she’d ever seen, late at night like this, less than a breath’s distance between them, it felt very risky. She swallowed and looked the other way, out the window. Her breath was coming quicker, her pulse hammering. Across the street from them, the school playground was shrouded in shadow, and for a moment Liam fancied she could see her phantom younger self playing there, chasing other kids down the slide, pigtails bouncing as she swung around the monkey bars. She hadn’t actually done a lot of those things–she’d been too sick.

“Weird to be back here,” she said quietly.

“Yeah?” Zayn said back. When Liam looked over, Zayn was looking at her, dark eyes intent and warm.

“You didn’t go here, right?” Liam said. Zayn had only moved to their area in secondary school. The two of them had moved through three years together barely intersecting. Zayn was in all the advanced classes and she kept to herself; she did theatre and set design, took art classes, raised her hand in English class and always had opinions that shut everyone else up. Liam was lucky if she could say anything in class without stumbling over her words.

“No, I was in Bradford until year eight.” Zayn chewed her lip for a moment. She raised a hand and brushed back a lock of hair that was tumbling into her face. Liam’s hands itched. She tucked them under her thighs. “D'you need me to turn on the heater?” Zayn said curiously.

“No,” Liam said sheepishly. She brought her hands back up, kept them interlocked so she didn’t do anything stupid. “Bradford, you said?”

“Yeah. Then my dad’s job brought us here.” She shrugged.

“D'you miss it?” Liam had spent her entire life in the same place. It wasn’t that she liked it, but everyone knew her now. There was no uncertainty in who’d say what or who’d look at her a certain way. The only uncertainty was the instability she’d brought, by being the way she was.  _You confuse people, love,_  her mum had said to her once, though it had been about something else. She wondered if it was the same in other places.

“Yeah,” Zayn said. It wasn’t a word, more of an exhale than anything. “Like, a lot.” Her voice firmed up. She rummaged in the small storage compartment between them, seemingly searching for something. “I mean, I grew up there. It’s not that I don’t like it here, you know, I just–” She didn’t find what she was searching for and dropped her hands. She looked up to Liam as if to say,  _you see?_

“Yeah, I get that.” Liam scratched at the hole in her jeans for lack of a better thing to say.

“You would,” Zayn snorted, half under her breath. She was turned away from Liam now, looking through the compartment in her car door.

“What?”

“You would,” Zayn said again. She looked annoyed. “Since everyone fucking treats you like shit and all. Hang on a mo, I’m gonna lean over you right here.” Then she stretched all the way across her seat and the gears and Liam’s lap and opened the glove compartment. Liam sat frozen. Zayn smelled bitter, like cigarette ash, but she was warm, and Liam could feel her breasts brushing against Liam’s leg. She’d never held a girl like this, as much as this could even be called holding. She’d never been this close to anyone except her family. The fact of how alone they were was suddenly made very clear to her–that it was 11 PM, that the two of them were in a car at night across the street from an elementary school, that Zayn’s hair was long and soft and brushing against her arms. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. Zayn’s elbow was digging into her knee. She held her breath, looked outside and up at the sky, velvety soft. She could smell Zayn’s shampoo.

“Ha!” Zayn said. She leaned back and held up a pack of cigarettes. “Mind if I smoke?” she said. Liam shook her head dumbly. She breathed in once, twice. Again she couldn’t help but notice the strange geometry of shadows that the streetlight cast on them both. Zayn’s long hair, angular small body, were magnified, spread in shadow across Liam’s lap. When she pulled a hairband off her wrist and tied it up, quick and efficient, in one of those automatic actions every girl but Liam seemed to have mastered, the action was hundredfold bigger, spread across the window, spilling out into the street. Liam looked at her a moment, drank in her lithe body, the white v neck she was wearing, the angles of her thin arms and the hollow of her throat shadowed in the orange light. Then she had to look away. Her throat was tight. She wondered what it made her, to look at girls the same way men looked at girls. She could remember, still, the oil slick of how she felt when men used to eye her on the street, the dark grey grease that choked her throat, made her want to rage and hurt. And she looked at Zayn like that, she knew–she couldn’t help it. She wanted. There was so much she wanted.

There was a silence between them, then, as Zayn performed the familiar rituals of all smokers: the lighter, the fag, the familiar click, hands cupped around a flame. She took a deep drag and rolled down the window, blowing the smoke out in a grey rush. Liam’s hands ached from how tightly she was holding them together. She wondered what Zayn had meant when she said everyone treated Liam like shit.

“Mind if I pop in some music?” Zayn said. She held up her phone. Liam half smiled and shook her head. The answering smile that broke out on Zayn’s face was almost too beautiful. It was strange because she didn’t even have a particularly beautiful smile; it was too big, stretched across her face strangely, her eyes crinkled and nose scrunched. It humanised her, though; she didn’t look so untouchable like that.

“So,” Zayn said. “What’s up?” She drew out the last word in an American accent, and Liam found herself laughing before she could stop it. Another crinkled smile spread across Zayn’s face. “What’s up, Lee-yum,” she said, again in that obnoxious American accent. She plugged her phone in with the AUX cord, and scrolled through it for a second before settling on something she seemed to like. An r&b track started playing, soft and thumping in the background.

“Nothing much,” Liam said, the smile still lingering on her face. She knew she was being too much, maybe–but sometimes she didn’t know how to stop herself, when she was around people she liked as much as she liked Zayn. She couldn’t ever react normally, act like a regular person, finish laughing at the same time everyone else finished laughing, wipe the smile off her face at the same time as everyone else. “Who’s this?” she said, gesturing her head over to the song.

“Jay Sean,” Zayn said. “You’ve–I mean, everyone’s heard him, but he did some really sick stuff before he got mainstream. Like, he sampled a lot of Indian beats and stuff, it’s really sick.” Liam couldn’t make out some of what he was saying.

“What’s this one called?” she said.

“Ride It,” Zayn said. She closed her eyes and danced in her seat along to the track, singing softly. The track was dirty, dirtier than Liam had thought from how soft it was. She scrubbed her hands across her face to hide how heated her cheeks were, but when she looked over, Zayn was grinning in a way that meant she’d noticed.

“Don’t listen to a lot of r&b?” she said.

“Oh, I–do, I guess, but just, not–” Liam wished she could make herself stop talking. She sighed. Zayn fiddled with her phone again, switching the song to something with a much darker beat.

“Oh,” Liam said. She liked this, though it wasn’t like anything she’d ever heard. “What’s this?” It was heavy, electronic, and the bass thumped through Zayn’s car. It was the perfect song for the night, the sky winking with stars, the way the two of them were alone, the eerie light that illuminated Zayn’s face as she grinned at Liam.

“He’s so good. I’m waiting for him to come out with something else.” Liam didn’t bother asking who he was.

They sat for a moment more as the song played on. Zayn was swaying in her seat, hips occasionally shifting as she moved to it, and Liam tried her hardest not to look.

“So,” she said after another moment. “Um. Bradford.”

“Yeah,” Zayn said. “It’s where I’m from.”

They regarded each other a moment and broke into smiles at the same time.

“Is it really different?” Liam said.

Zayn was silent for a moment. “You’ve never been outside of Wolvo?” she asked.

Liam shrugged. “London a couple of times for holiday, but not really, no.” She watched the sweep of Zayn’s eyelashes across her cheek as she processed this.

“It’s not that different,” she said finally. “Except that I knew people there, and I don’t really know people here. I don’t know. I don’t like the way people look at me here. It can be really–isolating, I guess. For you too, probably.” She looked up at Liam expectantly.

“Uh,” Liam said. “I mean, I guess.”

Zayn shrugged. She picked at a thread in the sleeve of her hoodie. “Are you–are we doing this?” she said, and Liam’s mind jumped to a completely different place before she realised she had no idea what Zayn was talking about.

“What?” she managed to squeak out.

“You’re gay, right?” It was strange to hear it in such plain terms. Liam nodded. “And it’s really obvious, because you dress like–that.” Meaning that right now Liam was wearing a men’s shirt and trousers. At the kebab place the girl at the register had tried to flirt with her before realising she wasn’t a bloke.

“I guess,” Liam said. She had no idea where this was going.

“So why are we pretending like you’re not–like people don’t treat you like shit?” The track playing in the background changed, to something similar sounding but even darker. There was a grimy, heavy, grinding beat, a man singing with distorted vocals about jasmine. Liam’s throat felt tight. She looked outside.

“I don’t talk about it much,” she managed to say.

“Yeah,” Zayn said. “I know.” She sounded really sad. When Liam looked at her, she’d shifted so that instead of sitting in the seat, she was sitting with her back against the car door, knees tucked up against her chest, facing Liam. She was wearing shorts, and her legs were long and smooth. Liam mirrored her but sat with her legs crossed instead, fingers tucked in between her calf and ankle. “You can talk about it, though. You know?” She was looking at Liam like she wanted Liam to say something back. Liam didn’t say anything at all. The laboured noise of her own breath sounded loud enough to her in the silence of the song playing, guitars twisting, beat groaning low and heavy. Zayn continued. “Because I think you’re really brave,” she said, so quietly Liam could barely hear her. “I wish I could–” Her eyes were shining like she wanted to cry. Liam clenched her hands into fists.

“I’m not,” she said with an effort. “It’s just–that’s who I am. No one ever said I was brave or anything.”

Zayn chewed her lip. The light was bright on her face now, but the orange gave her a strange glow. “I wish I could do what you do,” she said. It was so low Liam had to lean forward to hear her. She almost laughed.

“No you don’t. No one–who would want to look like–I’m a  _freak_.” Her voice cracked on the last word. It was between them now, open and raw. She’d never said it to anyone like that. She’d never talked about the way she dressed, the way she acted–not to anyone. She’d just started, one day, shopping in a different section, wearing different clothes, cutting her hair. Even when her mother gave her strange looks or her father hadn’t recognised her some days because he thought she was a bloke, neither of them said anything. She’d always been pathetically grateful for it because it meant they wouldn’t make her change. But she _was_  a freak. It wasn’t cruel to say it. It was the truth. Girls weren’t supposed to look the way she looked or act the way she acted and girls weren’t supposed to like other girls.

“You aren’t,” Zayn said. The words sounded like they were caught in her throat. “Beyond here, there’s so much else–you don’t even know. I wish I could be like you. I hate–” Her mouth twisted. She didn’t say anything else.

“You’re beautiful, though,” Liam said. She hadn’t meant to say it like that, though she’d been thinking it all night. It slipped out of her mouth carelessly. Her insides went cold, then hot. She swallowed jerkily. “I–I mean–”

Zayn laughed softly. “Thanks,” she said. Her hair, still caught up in a bun, was coming loose in the front, and a lock of hair slipped in front of her eyes. She pushed it back behind her ear. She had beautiful hands, beautiful fingers. Liam hated herself. “I wish I could look different, though. Or–I wish guys never looked at me.” She cut her eyes at Liam like Liam was supposed to have any idea what that meant. In the light, hair up and long legs tucked in front of her, she looked like every one of Liam’s fantasies come to life. When she said guys, she had to be including the way Liam looked at her. The way Liam thought about her.

Right at that moment she wanted nothing more than to reach out and take Zayn into her arms. Instead she smiled and said, “Yeah, I know.” She pressed herself against the car window as if that added bit of distance would mean that she could stop herself from doing something stupid. Then, down the street, a light shone brightly into the car. A policeman knocked at the window. Zayn rolled it down.

“Hello, officer,” she said pleasantly, shifting around so that she was sitting properly.

“This really isn’t a time for the two of you to be sitting around in a public place like this,” he said gruffly. “You, lad–” pointing at Liam– “Don’t let your girlfriend drive you around. Get a car, for god’s sake. Go home, both of you.” Liam nodded, tight lipped. As he walked away, Zayn cast a wide eyed glance at Liam.

It felt like they needed something else to break the tension. Liam wanted to laugh, but Zayn looked terrified, hands shaking on the wheel. Before she started the car up, she started playing a song even Liam recognised. As Jay-Z rapped about being searched, Zayn drove smooth and detached down the streets that led to Liam’s house.

“You all right?” Liam said. Again she wanted to reach out and touch Zayn, comfort her.

“I hate the police,” Zayn said tightly. “Ahh–” she shook her head at a stop sign, hair flying out of its bun. “Whatever. Fuck ‘em.” Liam didn’t say anything.

They stopped outside Liam’s place, the branches of the tree in her front lawn casting strange shadows on Zayn’s face. “Hey,” Zayn said, when Liam’s hand was poised on the door handle. “This was cool. D'you wanna do it again?”

Liam nodded. That smile spread across Zayn’s face again. “Come back a second?” she asked, and Liam eased back down into the car seat and faced Zayn, putting her back to the car door the way she had earlier. Zayn mimicked her and then they were sitting the same way they’d sat near the school. Almost in slow motion, Zayn reached a hand out, fussing at Liam’s hair; Liam held herself still. Zayn’s fingers felt electric where they touched her skin.

“Uh–” she said, and Zayn shushed her. She brushed the back of her hand over Liam’s cheek and then grabbed Liam’s hand in both of her own. “Zayn,” Liam said, trying to pull her hand away.

“Just a moment,” Zayn said, frowning at her. She rubbed her thumbs over Liam’s knuckles and Liam felt it all the way in her chest, a hot crackling that ran through her blood. Her breath came faster. “Listen,” Zayn said. “I want–I’d like to hang out with you more. Is that okay?” The way she said it sounded like she was asking for something more momentous than that.

“I’m–” Liam said, and had to clear her throat. “Yeah. I’d really like that.” They regarded each other for a moment. It was strange how beautiful Zayn was, Liam thought, not for the first time. But there was something behind that, too, in her eyes. The way she pushed back her hair, the crookedness of her smile. “I have to go,” Liam said. She pulled her hand away reluctantly.

“Yeah,” Zayn said. “Bye, then. See you on Monday.”

“See you,” Liam said. She closed the door behind her and walked up to the steps of her house. She unlocked the door and turned around. Zayn hadn’t driven away yet. At the sight of Liam, she waved and blew an exaggerated kiss, then finally put on her seatbelt and started up the car, pulling away from the street. Liam watched her go. she couldn’t quite pin down how she was feeling: excitement, maybe, but a strange disappointment too. Something kindling in her chest, an anticipation, perhaps. A candle flame. She couldn’t stop thinking about how small Zayn had felt bent over her, how warm. She couldn’t stop thinking about how Zayn’s fingers had held her own. A blush heated her cheeks. When she went to sleep later that night, she thought about how good and happy Zayn’s smile was. She wanted to make her smile like that again.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr [here](http://hotgaydumbledore.tumblr.com/) // rebloggable post [here](http://hotgaydumbledore.tumblr.com/post/133035106132/kissed-the-darkness-three-times-35k-pairing)
> 
> the music they were listening to: [1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2i5KnNghGc)/[2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUBAFPIHETA)/[3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWQMg56ZVZY)/[4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRW1s40_aOI)


End file.
